Poppy and I: Big family wedding

By Myra

I met Arline and her family the summer of 1945 in Bradley Beach, N.J.
She was my girlfriend, and I met her mother and two aunts. I was going
into my senior year of high school. I was at the shore cooking and
watching out for my grandpa Marcus by cooking and walking to the market,
etc. I went to Arline’s Sweet 16 party and met more girls. She lived a
bus ride away in Montclair, N.J. Her mother, Sadie, and I had ration
stamps we exchanged—she gave me soap powder and she took my sugar
stamps, etc. In a conversation one day, Arline said her uncle in the
Army Air Corps would like to get letters, so I wrote to him and put a
picture of myself in the envelope. (It was me in a two-piece swimsuit.)

We had a wonderful correspondence, but he was stationed in Enid, Okla.,
and waiting to get out of the service. He was
coming home on leave in April, and he asked me out when he came home. We
went out to the Meadowbrook for dancing with his brother Lester and his
girlfriend Florence. Needless to say, we all had a great time, and Al
and I had a few dates while he was on leave. We continued writing to
each other while I waited to graduate high school and Al
was waiting for his discharge. We were
attracted to each other right from the first meeting, and the chemistry
was there.

We were a couple from then on. I met all of Al’s friends and their
significant others. We got together after weekends for dinner at the
Jade Restaurant in Jersey City or hiking in the mountains and picnics,
etc., without spending too much money that we did not have. Both of us
spent most Sundays with my family—dinner, watching sports, tennis,
golf—or Al’s family, visiting one or more with my mother- or
father-in-law.

In the winter of 1946, we decided to get married. We
had many family meetings to discuss wedding plans. My father wanted his
aunts, uncles—Nana was one of nine—to be there and my mother was one of
four, plus husbands and wives, and two grandparents, cousins and their
friends. Then our friends, some of their friends. Then for the cocktail
portion, we had about 50 people from the store at the ceremony before
the dinner.

Al and I spent the night at a hotel in New York City,
and we ate dinner in a fancy restaurant, since neither of us ate very
much that day. The next day, we boarded a train to Miami Beach, where we
spent two weeks for our honeymoon. What a wonderful vacation it was.

We
got home and moved into mother and dad’s third-floor room and bath to
spend a few months waiting for our apartment to be built, and started to
order some furniture, etc. (This was right after World War II, and
things were scarce. They just started making cars, furniture, household
goods and pots and pans again.) We had to wait months for delivery of
most of the things. Both of us went to work. Al commuted to New York
City to work in the garment trade.

We both got to know each other each day and fell in love with each
other more than the day before.